I see the night sky as a jewellery store window and my mind is half a brick

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us
“universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his
thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting
us to our personal desires and to affection for persons nearest to us. Our task
must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody
is able t achieve this complexity, but the striving for achievement is in
itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”

Andrew McAfee's post, Now THAT's What I'm Talking About!, over at the Harvard Business School provides a great example of a fully operational application of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The article looks at Avenue A | Razorfishs' intranet and includes screenshots of some of the key pages.

There's been a lot of enthusiastic discussion around the application of Web 2.0 technologies within the organisation but until now there has been precious few real world examples.

It's great to see wiki technologies and techniques such as tag clouds being applied so effectively. The clever use of Del.icio.us, Flickr and Digg entries is particularly interesting (I'm off after this to see how I can apply it within my own organisation).

Hopefully as more companys start to adopt Enterprise 2.0 technologies we'll start to see more examples like this appearing.

You can find out more about the work of the Avenue A | Razorfish team over at the Workplace Blog.

Tom Waits is back in the media focus promoting his new album Orphans, he was interviewed by Mick Brown for The Word and as usual he has some great stories and observations. The one that struck the strongest chord was when he was asked about his ability to capture special moments in time that reasonate with meaning beyond the specific context.

... I think once you've experienced some of those moments you try to influence them. You're always waiting for them to happen, the way cats wait for things to move around the house; you sit quietly and wait, you know. You never know when the're going to happen and you to be ready. I think that's what people look for in songs. I write down song titles, usually, and usually something you 're going through emotionally will make a particular title leap out at you. This is what my wife says - there's something that you're already working on inside that this song will be the manifestation of. Now you have a container. The first thing that anyone ever created was a container. Someone made a bowl to hold the water. And then they made a song about the bowl that held the water. You know, people only travel really with their seeds and with their songs. In Bosnia they interviewed a lot of the refugees - they'd left with nothing and they asked them what they had, and they had seeds, in their pockets, from their gardens. And their songs. That was it. Once you're nourished in the most fundamental way, everything else will follow.

Ideally I would have liked to point you to the whole article but I guess you'll have to buy the magazine to read the rest of it.

If you'd like to read more interviews there's a list on the official site, unfortnately it looks as if it hasn't been updated for ages. Does anyone know of a more up-to-date collection?

In an unusual move Intel have partnered with a number of social networking providers, including Movable Type and SocialText to produce a suite of services aimed at the enterprise market. The combined solution goes under the banner of SuiteTwo and will be supported by SpikeSource. At a cost of $150 and $200 per seat per year they must hope that the benefit of a one stop solution is sufficient incentive for larger companies to plunder their meagre IT budgets.